Boeing and the Importance of Encouraging Employees to Speak Up

Executive Summary

What does it take to change a culture? Too often the answer is disaster. In the aftermath of the two fatal accidents of Boeing 737 Max jets, tentatively blamed on the over-automation of Boeing’s flight systems, renewed attention to Boeing production facilities was perhaps an inevitability. Evidence is now trickling out that workers in the troubled Boeing 737 Dreamliner plant in South Carolina were pushed to maintain an overly ambitious production schedule and fearful of losing their jobs if they raised concerns. This is a textbook case of how the absence of psychological safety — the assurance that one can speak up, offer ideas, point out problems, or deliver bad news without fear of retribution — can lead to disastrous results.

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What does it take to change a culture? Too often the answer is disaster.

In the aftermath of the two fatal accidents of Boeing 737 Max jets, tentatively blamed on the over-automation of Boeing’s flight systems, renewed attention to Boeing production facilities was perhaps inevitable. Evidence is now trickling out that workers in the troubled Boeing 787 Dreamliner plant in South Carolina were pushed to maintain an overly ambitious production schedule and fearful of losing their jobs if they raised concerns. This is a textbook case of how the absence of psychological safety — the assurance that one can speak up, offer ideas, point out problems, or deliver bad news without fear of retribution — can lead to disastrous results.

The accidents and the resulting media attention together create a real wake-up call for Boeing, which I expect will now embark on an examination of every aspect of its operations. What’s required, however, is more than operational fixes. It is nothing less than a full organizational culture change. But how telling it is that it takes a cataclysmic event (two, actually) for executives to take culture seriously? And yet, sadly, this is the way a thoroughgoing change in the culture of an organization happens most often: AFTER a big, visible failure or tragic event.

Let’s back up to consider how this comes about, from an organizational behavior point of view. We humans are finely attuned to risk. That ought to work in our favor, especially when it comes to things like engineering safety systems for airplanes. The trouble is, we are attuned mostly to interpersonal risk. We spontaneously overvalue maintaining a sense of comfort, security, and even belonging in the moment, and undervalue the vague, probably-won’t-even-happen, potentiality in the far-off future. Psychologists have a term for it: discounting the future.

It’s simple human nature. We don’t want to ruffle feathers. We don’t want to be the Cassandra. We don’t want to be thought of as stupid when we say: “I just don’t see how this is going to work.” We don’t want a dressing down when we point out a quality problem.

On top of that, the incentives embedded in most workplaces conspire against 1) employees speaking up and 2) managers actually hearing them. My colleague Bob Sutton of Stanford has written that “bosses live in a fool’s paradise,” often of their own making:

“Bearers of bad news, even when they aren’t responsible for it in any sense, tend to be blamed and to have negative feelings directed toward them. The result is the ‘mum effect:’ subordinates with good survival instincts soften bad news to make it sound better, or avoid passing it along to their bosses at all. Therefore, in a steep hierarchy it is a happier and happier story that reaches the top ranks.”

Unless.

Unless the culture — and by culture I especially mean the behavior of managers up and down the line — vehemently and continuously supports psychological safety.

In some unusual workplaces, organizational leaders — at the top, middle, and frontlines — have worked hard to create a culture of speaking up. Leaders of Pixar Animation, for example, created a mechanism they call “the brain trust” to institutionalize feedback. The brain trust has clear rules: comments must be constructive and aimed at the project and not the person; all must be ready to hear the truth; and no one takes anything personally. Barry-Wehmiller, the $3 billion global engineering firm, holds regular listening sessions, where employees speak their minds. And Toyota has its famous Andon cord, which ANY employee with a safety or quality problem (or even a potential safety or quality problem — because doubt and ambiguity are welcome at Toyota) can pull, no matter their rank, to instantly trigger a learning process. It’s worth noting that only 1 in 12 Andon cord pulls actually stops the assembly line. But all 12 trigger instant curiosity and collaborative problem solving.

There are various ways to get the culture change job done, but the common ingredient is institutionalizing the behavior of speaking up. I detail all of this, with practical tips and stories of success and failure, in my new book, The Fearless Organization. Some successful practices:

Explicitly setting times, places, and structures for team members to speak their minds.

Making these happen frequently, so the “ouch” is diluted and people become accustomed to lively back-and-forth.

Setting rules of engagement, with broad input, and writing them down as a set of norms that becomes part of everyone’s lexicon.

It’s an upstream swim to build and maintain a fearless organization. It means battling the natural tendencies of humans in groups. But companies like Toyota make it a priority because they understand the world is a fast-changing, risky, competitive place, and without all hands (eyes, and voices) on deck, the company is at risk of dramatic failures and, more insidiously, of creeping complacency, with its terrible consequences.

It needn’t take a tragedy to change a culture. What’s needed is speaking up and tuning in.

Editor’s note: We have updated the text of this article to reflect that the Boeing Dreamliner is a 787, not a 737.